Awaken with Harpreet

Product Management

Run a success product management summit

As product managers, product roadmapping and planning is one of the most rewarding activities that we do in our jobs. Determining the most valuable problems to solve and finding the shortest path to bringing them to the market is the engine that drives business growth. The biggest challenge that I

Travel

Things to do in Oia Santorini

(If you rather see the pictures, here [https://www.flickr.com/photos/singh_harpreet/with/42628753392/] they are) Describing Oia in a blog post is very easy — we went to Oia and stayed there for 2 days :-). Because there isn’t anything else you do in Oia — you get

Machine Learning

What is softmax in neural networks

A softmax function squashes its inputs to be between 0 and 1 and also normalises them so that the sum is equal to 1. Let’s take a problem where we have to classify between three classes. Softmax is used to classify for greater than 2 classes for less than

Travel

The walk of thee three bells of Fira in Santorini

Caldera, dinner viewThe first day in Fira definitely got into the island mode after a gorgeous sunset and dinner overlooking the Caldera. We decided to head to the Three Bells of Fira which is part of the iconic church that is often used in pictures. Church enroute to FirastefaniThis walk

Travel

The poor donkeys of Santorini

One of the things that Santorini is known for, is, donkeys. You cannot really miss them on t-shirts, refrigerator magnets and stuffed toys that show these cute loveable creatures smiling away and living the island life. A thing to do in Fira is to take a donkey to climb up

Travel

Visiting charming Fira in Santorini

Fira in Santorini is the “it” town and this is where the tourists head to. Our driver dropped us off near the main square after picking us up at the airport and I was taken aback to see the number of tourists in the main square. It seemed like Goa!

Machine Learning

Understanding cross entropy in neural networks

Let’s say that there are a bunch of events and a bunch of probabilities, cross entropy predicts how likely are those events likely to happen based on the probabilities. A high cross entropy means that an event is unlikely to happen while a low event indicates that the event

Travel

The Turkish bath - Istanbul Hamam Experience

One of the questions that a traveller has to inevitably make in Istanbul is whether a traveller should do the Turkish Bath/Hamam experience. The answer is a definite yes. Types of Hamam You have a choice between many types of Hamams — traditional (Cemberlitas Hamami [http://www.cemberlitashamami.com/index.

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneur of the year - Street photographer in Istanbul

Yesterday, I was at Emononu, a ferry station in Istanbul and spotted one of the most entrepreneurial person that I have seen. I was blown away by his entrepreneurial spirit. The Sultanahmet area in Istanbul is teeming with tourists and so if you are a tourist and have spent anywhere

Leadership

13 principles to build successful and vibrant communities

Lessons learnt from leading one of the most successful open source software projects My colleague Kohsuke Kawaguchi [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohsuke_Kawaguchi] , has built Jenkins [http://jenkins.io/], one of the most popular open source projects in the market. He has built a vibrant and thriving community (by

Productivity

The money framework for decision making

2017 was the year I agonised over buying a Tesla Model X. I ran through all the reasons I needed it — beautiful, gorgeous, drives fantastic, best technology and green. I just couldn’t come to a conclusion, because the price was a serious consideration. The problem at hand was that

Leadership

Four leadership principles to become a good leader

> “Look at what you have built — did you ever imagine that this was going to be so big?” A colleague asked me this question at a team event fairly recently. > My answer — “always”. I was confident in my response because I had laboured over for years on the degree of

Meditation

Reaching a deep meditation stage quickly

Just as with the circle of life, every meditation session is bookended by a starting up and a closing phase. Just as with birth where a good nine months with a good delivery will set the baby up for a healthy life versus one with struggle, a good startup phase

Productivity

Countering decision fatigue

If you ever held a job that requires you to drive long distances or hop into trains switch to a cab etc etc, you surely have noticed that you arrive tired at work. But that’s not all, there is something more insidious that is going below the surface — you

Miscellaneous

Ode to a hero - Baahubali Sanskrit song - delightful

While growing up in India, I chose French in school over Sanskrit. Twenty years later, my niece made the same choice despite me persuading her not to. Why does an Indian kid with little chance of living in France choose French over his/her native language? Perhaps, we’ve been

Meditation

Calming down the nerves with Aana Paana meditation

Having a stressful day at work? If so, use the Aana Paana meditation as your go-to technique to find your calm and centre and deal with your day. It takes about 10 minutes to centre you. Stressful work day - anyone? Have you noticed that our modern workday is designed

Meditation

Chasing Turiya - the fourth state of consciousness

I believe the audience for this blog in the world is a grand total of less than a couple of dozen and fewer who would understand the desire to chase Turiya - I frankly don’t understand it myself :-). Thus, I am documenting this as a reminder to myself

Meditation

Lotus heart meditation - end of the day meditation practice

The Lotus heart meditation calms your nerves, addresses insomnia and helps adjust to jet-lag. Let’s how you can bring this technique in to your life. I am on a mission to prove to people that meditation is easier than they think it is. Most individuals have an unrealistic definition

Meditation

The gratitude habit - the one thing to make your day productive

(Photo credit: Tom Woodward) In the last blog, I gave a very quick lay of the land of meditation. In this blog, I will get you started quickly. So quickly and so easily that you will wonder why you haven’t done meditation in the past! Disclaimer: This blog essentially

Meditation

Beginners guide to meditation

Recently, a couple of my closest friends have been recommended to start meditation from their physician as a means for improving their general well-being. My friends asked me a few questions about it and the line of questioning leads me to believe that it is highly likely that they are

Machine Learning

Understanding neural networks - a dog lovers primer

Let’s look at a problem: I am a dog lover and I subscribe to Instagram where I get a stream of images of toasters, birds, cats and dogs. While these images are exciting (who doesn’t like toasters :-)), what I want to do, is automatically save images of

Product Management

Discovering what customers really want

Recently I wrote 2 blogs (tell me more, be an intern) talking about tips to conduct an effective customer/prospect interview for product managers. This blog wraps up the tail end of that series. One of the most effective power questions is “What else is on your mind”. I picked

Machine Learning

Teaching a program to paint like an artist

There are some things that completely blow your mind. Applying artist specific styles to images is one of them. Completely sci-fiction - although the Prisma filter has made this accessible. In the last blog [http://harpreetsingh.github.io/blog/2017/01/28/deeplearning-udacity-setup], I set up the core software requirements

Product Management

The power of tell me more question for Product Managers

20 Jan 2017 Finding the right problem, its details, from customer interviews are similar to finding an address in India. A problem while looking for an address in India is that neighbourhoods are congested and the roads are not labeled. One uses landmarks to reach to the right area, find

Product Management

Conducting great customer interviews - Be an intern

Last week, I visited a CloudBees customer with Kohsuke Kawaguchi (Jenkins’ founder) to interview them. The goal was to understand their key challenges and concerns. Over the years, Kohsuke and myself have done innumerable customer interviews together and somewhere along the way we have hit on a formula that makes